2000 Technical Excellence Award

Jason Cong

The following is the text of the presentation speech delivered by SRC Board of Director's Chairman, Richard D. Schinella, LSI Logic Corporation, at the awards ceremony held during the Board of Directors meeting, November 8, 2001.

The SRC Technical Excellence Award is given annually to researchers who, over a period of years, have demonstrated creative, consistent contributions to the field of semiconductor research, who are ground breakers and leaders in their fields, and who are regarded as model collaborators with their colleagues in the SRC member community.

One of the current research objectives outlined in the ITRS is interconnect planning. Interconnect has already become the dominant component in determining overall circuit performance, reliability, cost, as well as timing closure and time-to-market.

The SRC has selected Professor Jason Cong's work in "Interconnect Estimation, Planning and Synthesis for Deep Sub-micron Designs" to receive the 2000 Technical Excellence Award.

Dr. Cong was one of the first within the semiconductor community to call attention to the need for interconnect-centric analysis and optimization techniques. He developed the first systematic set of interconnect estimation models including consideration of interconnect optimizations. They can significantly improve design closure and turn-around time. These models have been incorporated into several SRC member company tools.

SRC has sponsored the filing of a patent for his work showing that the very simple wire-sizing schemes with one or two widths are good enough to approach an optimal solution. This result was confirmed by researchers at IBM's Austin Research Lab.

Since 1990 Jason Cong has been on the faculty in the Computer Science Department and Co-Director of the VLSI CAD Laboratory at the University of California/Los Angeles. His interests lie in the areas of computer-aided design of VLSI circuits, rapid prototyping of digital systems and computer architecture.

Dr. Cong is committed to mission of Technology Transfer within the SRC community, proactively inviting industry mentors to an on-campus meeting each year. He, also, encourages students to develop relationships with the industry community with several of his students taking positions with member companies.

It is with great pleasure that on behalf of the SRC Board of Directors, I award the 2000 Technical Excellence Award to Professor Jason Cong.